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Jason Brown — an Olympic rookie with a signature ponytail and unselfconscious enthusiasm — is now a bronze medalist after the team event in Sochi. Related ArticleCredit Matthew Staver for The New York Times

Language Arts

All week we’ve been posting lesson ideas related to the 2014 Winter Games. Below, our list for literature, journalism, media studies and fine arts classes, as well as suggestions for E.L.L. students. You can
find ideas for social studies, science, math and more by scrolling through our full collection.

The Winter Games opening ceremony featured the glowing white troika, the chariot drawn by three horses immortalized in Gogol’s novel “Dead Souls.” Related ArticleCredit Doug Mills/The New York Times

Read about and view slide shows of the opening ceremonies at the Sochi and the London Games. Both offered nods to the famous literature of the host nation, including “War and Peace” and Nabokov in Russia and “Harry Potter” and Shakespeare in England.

Pick a country and imagine you are creating scenes that celebrate its literary heritage for the opening of an Olympics. What authors and texts would you celebrate? How are these central to the country’s identity?
What would they tell the world about the host country? How can you weave allusions to famous
characters, stories and authors into your scenes?

The Lessons of Grit

Stories of athletes facing challenges and rising above them are what make the Olympics so compelling. Whic athletes are you following in the Sochi Games whom you especially admire? Why? What lessons can you learn from
them about perseverance?

Read stories like the ones below, or find your own by scrolling through all of The Times’s Sochi reporting. Before writing your own piece, you might read closely and notice
how profiles are constructed in The Times. Using these categories from our lesson plan, look through the Sochi coverage and find great examples of:

Openings that hook the reader at the start.

Pieces with surprising details.

Articles with interesting anecdotes.

Passages in which a reporter incorporated lively direct quotes.

Examples of how a piece may reveal a subject’s flaws as well as strengths.

Russia is, of course, eager to make the best impression as the host of this year’s Olympic games, but reporters always look beneath the surface of the public-relations spin.

Read Sarah Lyall’s account of the village the Olympics left behind and view the slide show. What alternate
story do you hear here? Have you seen coverage of this alternate reality on TV? Why not? Why is it important for this story to be told? Look beyond the glitz and find other examples of this kind of coverage to share,
either from The Times or elsewhere.

Follow the New York Times’ Sochi 2014 Twitter account, which features contributions from New York
Times journalists at the Winter Olympics in Russia and in New York, and compare the information you get there with the coverage on NYTimes.com.

What are the benefits and drawbacks of each information source? Where else are you getting Olympics information? Do you watch the Games on both television and a “second screen”?
How is social media changing your viewing experience? What moments or events might have gone viral in one of the Olympics held in the 20th century if there had been social media then? Why?

Olympics Photojournalism

Photo

Vanessa James and Moran Cipres of France finished 11th in pairs figure skating. Related Photo CollectionCredit Josh Haner/The New York Times

Use the Olympics Pictures of the Day feature as inspiration for your school publication, particularly if you have a website. What story might daily photographs tell about your school and its students? Take the photos
and practice caption writing to accurately reflect your community.

Another photo idea? Choose an action or activity and attempt to capture it in image sequences, like the photographs in this feature.
Take the images and make a flip book to see your subject in action.

…the most tasteful, fashion-conscious and visually generic Olympics in recent memory. Regional costume is vanishing from the planet, kept alive at the opening ceremony of each new Olympics and on the it’s-a-small-world
ride at Disneyland. Increasingly it is a small world in style terms, one in which traditional garments like saris, dhotis, lungis, kimonos and sarongs are on their way out, jeans having become as inevitable
a uniform of daily life in Delhi or Dublin as in Dubuque.

Do you agree with his assessment? Is the dwindling of regional and national emblems a good or a bad thing? Look through the photographs accompanying the article as inspiration, then choose a country and create your
own Olympic uniform — one that makes a statement and incorporates the country’s colors and culture.

Alternatively, have a look at this interactive gear guide. In which piece of equipment do you think form and function are most
elegantly melded? Why? How would you improve these designs?

Get Lucky

This performance of the popular Daft Punk song has taken the Internet by storm. Historically, what role has music played
in the Olympic games? What role did it play in the opening ceremonies in both Sochi and London? Take a look at this compilation of official Olympic songs from 1976 to 2008 to think about how opening songs have functioned in the past, then imagine an Olympics staged in your home country. If your country was staging the Games this winter, what current or classic song might you take
and remake —”Get Lucky”-style — for the opening ceremonies? Why?

Standards

This resource may be used to address the academic standards listed below.